Personal Tour of White Monkey Design Inc

What a great Friday 13th it was. I get the day off and nothing to do but drive up to Vancouver to tour White monkey design and then that evening watch the Mid-Season Finale for Battlestar Galactica with the Vancouver Battlestar Galactica Fan Club.

I roll up to the Peace Arch Border crossing around 12:40pm. I love the fact they remind you to use KM instead of MPH. (I did notice driving in BC that almost no one follows the speed limit.)

After a little lunch and a construction filled trip up to Vancouver I arrive at White Monkey. It’s a very unassuming building. Nestled amongst an Asian food wear house and a small suburb. You would never know these guys were there. I go up to the side door and ring the buzzer. One of the workers greets me at the door. Booth Milton, White Monkey’s owner, is in but is frantically on the search for two bottles of Methelene Di-Chloride that they recently purchased but no one can find. The lobby for all intensive purposes can be called that is a treasure trove of photos and props from previous productions. It’s amazing to see the history on the walls.

Booth warmly greets me in the front lobby. “Come on in, let me show you around.” Our first destination is the laser engraving room. It’s full of old props. Lots of dentist chairs that have been converted to look sci-fi. In the back of the group of chairs is the dream chair used in “Tin Man” the miniseries. All of it’s lights are still working. Right next to the engraving room is the 3D digital scanning station and break room. The scanning tech was working on cleaning up the 3D scan of a Northwest aboriginal wood carving of a Raven. Ultimately it will be rendered and animated so that it’s wings will flap.

Around the corner and into another room is one of Booth’s craftsmen working on one of his many Moto Guzzi motorcycles. Hey, all work and no play makes a dull boy as they say. It’s great fun to see Booth shift gears and decide what to do with this bike. Apparently one of the exhaust bolts is cross threaded into the aluminum head. Of course it is seized in place and rusted. That always seems to be the case with anything old and Italian. (I should know I’ve worked on vintage Alfa Romeos.) They decide to leave the bolt alone and just ride the bike to enjoy it. “Smart move” I think to myself. While Booth and his employee were discussing the Guzzi I happen to notice that one entire wall of this room is filled with all of the prop moulds that they have created. It spans floor to ceiling. Some of the labels are of props for Eureka, like laser rifles and such. Directly connected to this room is the mould casting room. It’s full of latex, plaster and resins.

Next in the maze of rooms is the electronics room. All of the little electric gizmos, LEDs, motors etc. are done in this room. It’s full of bins of electrical stuff. The next room over is Booth’s newly redecorated office. It’s very peaceful and quite in there. Great for meeting with clients or to give Booth some peace — or so they hope, Booth is constantly on the go it seems.

Off to the front entry and down the stairs into the basement. This is where all of the magic really happens. descending the narrow stairwell you are greeted by pewter masks and vintage radio equipment. At the base of the landing in every nook and cranny is “gak” — an industry term for the stuff props are made from — and lots of it. Old wireless units and scientific equipment with their buttons and knobs missing along with their guts prised apart and used for sci-fi bits.

Entering into the basement is amazing. It’s a craftsman’s dream shop. There are tables of props in various stages of completion. Photos and prop schematics line the walls. There are bins and drawers full of what seem to be random stuff but the chaos seems to have an order to it. Unfortunately, I was too late to see the most recent props White Monkey had built for Battlestar and it’s spin off Caprica. If I had been there in the morning I would have seen them. Not to fret, there were plenty of other props to be amazed at. To my right an octagonal case was being constructed for “Eureka.” On the work bench lay the artist’s renderings of the final prop. It was some sort of electronic bomb. In front of me on a table was an old pitch fork. Rusted and dried out… or so I thought. Later on I would find out it was made of rubber. I passed this pitch fork no less than 20 times and each time thought it was real.

On a table to my left was a few light weight gold tablets for “Night at the Museum 2.” These were made of vacuuformed styrene with a foam core. This particular props was to be carried by the the little capuchin monkey named Dexter. Hence the light weight nature of the prop. There were four tablets being prepped. Each tablet was to be covered with real gold foil. One was being prepped so that the symbols could be rotated.

In the very back of the room sat the CNC router. They were in the middle of machining one of the face plates for the “Eureka” prop. Right behind that in another room was the materials room where all of the wood and billet aluminum was stored. Round the corner and you are standing in the milling and lathe room. To the back of the is room which is situated by the front stairs is the casting room. This room is where all of the rubber or resin props get cast before they are worked on in the prop room. The only thing in there at the moment were some soft rubber swords for “Night in the Museum 2.”

Back through the lathe room and hang a left spits you right back into the prop shop.

Over in the corner by the stairs and Booth’s desk is the spray booth.  Maria (Booth’s business partner) is busy painting up a trio of rubber meat cleavers for delivery later that day.

Back on out to the prop workshop and Booth has to go upstairs to handle some business. And also look for the Methelene Di-Chloride, which no one really seems to know where it has gone. While booth was upstairs I got a chance to peek a little at the projects “The Monkeys” were working on.  Everything was so realistic it was mind bogeling.

While I was waiting, Maria finished painting the meat cleavers and brought them out to compare to the real meat cleaver. She placed them next to each other and and asked me which one I though was the real one. At first glance I couldn’t tell. It wasn’t till I leaned in close that i could really see the difference. The rubber cleavers were only meant to be on the screen for a fraction of a second in a darkly lit room, but you’d thing they were the “real-deal.” Maria explaind that the level of reality that they had to produce to get and keep some of the movie projects is a never ending struggle in their line of business. Each movie or TV project has it’s own set of criteria to set up the amount of reality that a particular prop requires. Take the meat cleaver for instance… Although it only gets about one second or less of actual screen time it has to look real because of the new HD format that everything is being filmed at these days.

HD creates the problem now-a-days for most prop builders due to the crystal clear image that is being captured. In the “old days” props didn’t have to have the same level of reality like the props now. You can see on the screen when a prop looks fake. White Monkey Design had to figure out how to stay within budget while at the same time provide a level of quality that would pass the muster of a super critical audience.

Not only do prop studios have to deliver props that to look and feel real, they have to do it within the budget provided by the production. Maria and I headed up to her office so she could show me the super complex “billable hours” spreadsheet that she uses to keep track of each project that they work on. Usually when you think of a typical Excel Spreadsheet you have see a few columns and rows with hours and stuff planned out. Well, not these spreadsheets. These were probably the most complex spreadsheets I had ever seen in my entire life. Over a hundred columns and over a thousand rows each with it’s own formula tables and special color coding for each film/TV project they were working on. Simply amazing. Maris pointed out the the tight margins they had to work within for each project. The “Profit and Losses” for each project were staggering. Some productions had almost unlimited funds to pour into props while other smaller productions had mandatory caps on their spending. Sometimes the smaller projects could not finish paying what was owed in man hours and White monkey had to take it as a loss for that month. Looking over the book, one really gets to see the volatile nature of the film industry. It’s not always the big money and glamour you see on “E” television or “People” magazine. The reality is, prop building is susceptible to the same factors that could drive a flower shop or catering business out of work. The economy or even the “Writers Strike” from the beginning of the year can play havoc on this line of business. White Monkey luckily has a niche market in the Vancouver film industry so their services are pretty much always in demand. Two of their fellow prop studio competition didn’t fair the writer’s strike so well and had to go out of business a few months ago.

The other danger for the prop business comes from oversees competition. Especially China. They can mass propduce props at a fraction of the cost of local businesses and don’t fall under any of the Unions. Luckily most of the studios in Vancouver are sticking with the local film trades and keeping highly skilled job on the continent. (for now…)